THE STORY – Focuses on how the evangelical movement paved the way for the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro and poses the threat of a national theocracy.
THE CAST – Petra Costa, Jair Bolsonaro & Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
THE TEAM – Petra Costa (Director/Writer), Alessandra Orofino & David Barker (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 100 Minutes
While chronicling the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and the arrest of former President Lula da Silva in 2019’s “The Edge of Democracy,” director Petra Costa found herself taken aback by the rise of Christian evangelicals in her home country, which led to the election of far-right Jair Bolsonaro. Wondering how such a widespread movement escaped her notice, Costa picked up her camera again and went back to work, investigating the factors that led to such a shift in the country. Had her closeness to and alignment with the left wing (Costa’s parents are both left-wing activists who were persecuted by the country’s military dictatorship) blinded her to what was happening in the country at large? At the start of “Apocalypse in the Tropics,” Costa’s voiceover finds her pleading for an answer, practically begging to understand what happened. She finds an ultimately simple explanation that offers no easy solution to stop the events that follow in 2020 and beyond, culminating in a chillingly familiar sight (to Americans) as a right-wing mob descends on the nation’s capital and violently breaches and vandalizes it.
Costa traces the history of Brazil’s evangelical churches over the course of six chapters and four years of incredible access to Bolsonaro, da Silva, and most importantly, the country’s leading evangelical pastor, Silas Malafaia. The film serves as a bit of a biography of Malafaia, the televangelist who has become one of the most noteworthy people in Brazilian politics. Since the 1980s, Evangelical Christians have grown from only 5% of the country’s population to over 30%, making them one of the most powerful voting blocs in the country, and Malafaia, who has pushed for the church to become more political ever since he first became a pastor, is their self-appointed leader. He comes across as both deeply serious and incredibly ambitious – a dangerous mixture – and Costa gets a lot of mileage from just letting him speak. The man is the most frightening kind of true believer, one whose allegiance belongs to whoever does the most to bring about the rapture, no matter how much they’ve done in the past – witness how he viciously turns on Bolsonaro when it appears as though he may not be able to deliver on one of his campaign promises, despite all the then-President had done for the movement. The furor he stokes in his followers leads to some frightening imagery, as when people stopped to pray in the middle of the streets at the peak of COVID, and altogether too many necessary uses of the “speaking in tongues” subtitle. Costa brings her camera as close to people as they will allow, weaponizing the frame against them in sly ways, turning their religious fervor into something out of a horror film.
Perhaps the film’s most valuable contribution is its breakdown of the history of evangelical belief and how this particular branch of Christianity came to Brazil. Unsurprisingly, America makes an appearance in the form of Rev. Billy Graham, who tied together the desire to save people’s souls and the desire to save the world from Communism in a mass of missionaries that reeks of colonialism. Reaching out to the poor, disenfranchised rural communities of Brazil to tell them that Jesus will save them grew the Church’s presence in Brazil, and soon enough, more people put their faith in God, who has performed miracles eons in the past, over their elected officials who regularly lie and don’t follow through on promises. All it took was someone with the unrepentant zeal of Malafaia to realize the power this community could have if they came together politically, and once politicians realized they could easily win and keep political power by playing to the Evangelicals, it was game over. The parallels to the current American society are stark, but Costa doesn’t make a big deal out of them, keeping the film focused on Brazil and trusting the audience to not miss the obvious. Costa’s brilliance is partly because she realizes that what happened in Brazil not only happened but is happening around the world, and she lets the connections between Brazil and elsewhere exist in the background. In doing so, she achieves the holy grail of making art: Making something universal out of something specific.
As terrifying as the film is, the arc of history truly does seem to bend towards justice, as the reveal that a judge and a prosecutor collaborated to send da Silva to jail gets him released from prison and then thrust back into the national spotlight and on to an extremely narrow victory over Bolsonaro in the country’s most recent election. Even still, the images of the destruction left behind in the wake of the right-wing mob at the nation’s capitol chill the bones, especially keeping in mind Costa’s explanation of Evangelical beliefs, most notably that they see war as a necessity to avoid something worse. Malafaia and his followers may have lost this battle, but their holy war is ongoing. Given that Costa’s personal search for answers is a large part of the film’s driving force, one wishes that she would have pushed Malafaia, Bolsonaro, and even da Silva actually more than she does, really digging deep into their beliefs and challenging their responses. As a documentarian, though, she took the smarter path by allowing them to simply speak, giving them enough rope to hang themselves with their responses. The result is one of the most important documentaries of the year, one that looks at the past, present, and future with a clear eye and raises an alarm. “It happened here, right under our noses, while we weren’t looking,” Costa seems to say, and if it could happen in Brazil, it could happen anywhere. “Apocalypse in the Tropics” gives us everything we need to avoid the real apocalypse that power-hungry religious ideologies are looking to drive us towards; now it’s on us to put in the work to ensure we don’t get to that point.